This is it, folks. This is the big one. After four weeks of brutal polling and extremely heart-felt campaigning, we have reached the Championship Round of our O-Deck January Madness!

Last round was rough. The canids came extremely close to being completely eliminated from the brackets, and were literally saved by a coin toss. When the polls closed yesterday, the Snow Leopard and the Fennec Fox were tied, each with 51 votes. I decided to let the universe make the deciding vote and flipped a coin - heads for Fennec Fox (because of the ears), tails for Snow Leopard (because floof). The coin landed heads up, so our final poll features the ultimate canid/felid match-up. I will make a special post on Friday to let you all know the final results.

[Click to embiggen]

Before you vote in the final poll, I just want to say that this was extremely fun for me to put together and I’m absolutely blown away by how many people got so involved - I hope to do this again later this year with some of the other animals I’ve written about (yes, bangishotyou, the mustelids. And yes, Dr. Lizardo, the hyenas). See you then!